Design of long range low power sensor node for the last mile of IoT

Internet of thing (IoT) is not only a promising research topic but also a blooming industrial trend. One typical application is environmental sensing which is the basis of automation systems applied in home, factory, agriculture, disaster prevention/detection, and so on. To increase the serving area especially for outdoor scenarios, long transmission range is preferred, but this makes a sensor node draw high current during transmitting. Because electricity is not available everywhere in the target field, low power is also a must for the last mile of IoT. To meet the above requirements, in addition to RF radio technologies, media access control (MAC) also plays an important role. This paper presents a design of sensor node based on a commercial module to achieve the goals of low power and long range by employing IEEE 802.15.4e Time slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH). According to the experiment data, a sensor node can sustain for over 20 years when the sensing frequency is 20 seconds/per sample.